The brainchild of Jimmy Wales, among others, and the original 'project' of the subsequent Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), Wikipedia's stated objective is to have an officially 'neutral point of view' (NPOV). Sadly, many articles suffer from systemic bias; Wikipedia is often justifiably accused by people on one side of an issue of being biased toward the other side, and vice-versa. This is true across the political spectrum, as well as for many other issues and subjects covered. Wikipedia is the biggest fish in the global wiki pond, and receives far more traffic, andediting activity, than any other wiki. However, despite Wikipedias' claim to being an 'encyclopedia', many academic institutes and other professional organisations recommend that Wikipedia is not used as a primary source of information, due to the fact that many articles are frequently incorrect, and can be routinely adversely biased. Furthermore, many Wikipedia articles have a seemingly extremely low threshold of 'reliable source' references and citations. Indeed, many Wikipedia articles fail their own verifiability criteria, and can remain for many years without any citations, despite highly visible warning banners highlighting the lack of said citations (and threatening to delete said unreferenced articles); this even includes biographical articles for living people. Also, the English Wikipedia allows articles to be 'promoted' to a good article (GA) status; despite failing their own criteria on having adequate reliable source citations, editorial conjecture, and even original research. [1]

When launched in 2001, Wikipedia was initially powered by UseMod Wiki, a wiki engine software package developed by Clifford Adams used to moderate the quality of posts on Usenet. Wikipedia used this UseMod Wiki software during its first year of 2001, until 25 January 2002, when it started to use the 'Phase II software' as developed by Magnus Manske. On 20 July 2002, 'Phase III software' (a complete rewrite of Manskes' Phase II by Lee Daniel Crocker) was released and used on the English Wikipedia, and at the same time, was renamed MediaWiki. [2] MediaWiki has subsequently been extensively developed through continued collaborative evolutions, and as well as being used all 900-or-so wikis of the Wikimedia Foundation, MediaWiki is now used by thousands of other independent wiki sites and many commercial wiki farms.

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF), founded 20 June 2003, is the wiki company and non-profitcharitableorganization responsible for a very large number (over 900 in total) of very active wikis, grouped together and known as 'projects'; as well as the wiki engine software initially developed by themselves, known as MediaWiki. The Foundations' major wiki projects include Wikipedia (encyclopedias), Wiktionary (dictionary and thesaurus), Wikiquote (quotations), Wikibooks (open content textbooks), Wikisource (free content primary and secondary source texts), Wikinews (news source), Wikiversity (open learning community), Wikispecies (free species directory), and many others as listed below. Most of these projects have separate wiki versions written in many different languages. There is also the Wikimedia Commons (shared repository for documents, images, videos, and other media files), Wikidata (central space knowledge base for data used on all WMF projects), and the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki (coordination of issues common to all Wikimedia projects). The Foundations' global reach is nurtured in its Incubator, where all new language versions for all projects are initiated and developed before being rolled out. Its most recent major project, Wikivoyage (a 'travelpedia'), was inducted to WMF in late 2012.